KARENJUNE SANCHEZ

I’m sorry.
I’m just a little freaked-out at the moment.
I thought I was going somewhere else.
I thought—
because my father was black
and my mother was Hawaiian—
I’d be going somewhere else.

 

I’m twenty-eight.
I was born and raised in El Paso.
My father was the king of hardware and lumber.

 

There was a hole in the floor next to the bed.
It was very black.
My mother and father were still very poor—
before Pop became king of hardware and lumber.
We moved into this little house on the West Side.
We weren’t there long.
In any case, my father filled that hole
the next day.
But my first night in that house,
I slept in a bed next to that hole in the floor
that was black and deep and quiet.

 

The first one to climb out of that hole
in the floor called himself Ace Man.
He was a card player from San Antonio
who died in a car accident
the day he quit his job for Bekins
and was speeding through Oklahoma
to see a new girlfriend—

a woman whose furniture he moved himself.
Ace Man had long ears and a tiny mustache
and was half-Mexican, half-Hopi.
I was eight years old and we played cards
for hours and he always beat me.

 

He cried out loud for his lost love
and how he never got to live with her
and how unfair it is to get killed
the day your freedom arrives
and you’re on the road
and the radio’s playing “Free Bird”
and the earth seems endless
and the people in it seem slightly less evil.

 

His friends eventually came out of the hole too:
they had funny names like
Little Finger and Clay and Smokes and Chieftain and Lagrimas
and Sparky
and all of them were mixed bloods
of some kind or another
and coming from different
and conflicting cultures
they didn’t know what afterlife to go to
so they hung around this narrow hole in El Paso
for the rest of time
and they all had tales of loss and regret
and told jokes
because the loss and regrets didn’t get them down
and they knew how to party
and forget their pain,
and they gave me advice
on how to live in the world
and be myself

and fight my fights,
and see the unusual in the usual,
and turn darkness into light and laughter,
and even with tears in their eyes
they knew how to laugh,
and sometimes the saddest ones
laughed the loudest,
and I thanked those imperfect souls
and I kissed each one good night
and each one slipped back
into the hole in the floor
and the next day my father
covered it up forever with cement.

 

And that’s where I always thought I’d end up:
in a covered-up hole in a bedroom floor
in El Paso, Texas.